Large-scale emigration challenges states at the European periphery to their core. The territorialised population - a foundational condition of modern statehood - has been transformed by European integration and by (e)migration. Mobility, along with citizens' claims to individual liberty and welfare, has become increasingly Europeanised. Yet the material base for these claims remains anchored in the nation-state and its citizenry. This tension constitutes the central puzzle from which this volume departs: population depletion, as the loss of a core state resource, feeds back into changing state-citizen relations and into struggles over citizens' rights and duties.
The book documents these struggles and their consequences for politics and policy, with particular attention to their economic and welfare dimensions. The politics of emigration are examined through changing voter attitudes and behaviour linked to population loss, including rising support for nationalist and right-wing parties. Emigration policies are explored through state- and local-level efforts aimed at encouraging the return of emigrant citizens. The welfare and economic dimensions explicate the contexts that drive emigration and its effects on growth models, as well as on systems of health and care within the European single market.
Combining qualitative and quantitative research, the contributions compare European emigration countries as diverse as Albania, Greece, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Portugal and Romania. The volume identifies two types of state transformation: a re-emergent nation-state that re-discovers its core resource, the citizenry, and states that functionally and socially adapt to sustained population loss. Both scenarios position emigration as a key variable for understanding contemporary societal and political change in Europe's periphery.